Social and ecological correlates of rural fires in Greece

Rural fires in Greece have proliferated at alarming rates during the past two decades, seriously threatening the countryʹs forest resources. Researchers and policy makers appear to agree on some key fire policy elements determined on the basis of reasonable hypotheses. This paper constitutes a first attempt to qualify these hypotheses by means of a simple statistical formulation of fire incidence and fire cause. Applying stepwise and OLS methods on data covering the period 1978–1987, the article concludes that political events and economic development leading to increased demand for land along with some cultural and ecological phenomena are responsible for the destruction of the Greek forests.